Daghestanian loans database

Authors: Ilya Chechuro, Michael Daniel, and Samira Verhees.

This database contains wordlists collected as part of the Daghestanian loans project by the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory at NRU HSE. The aim of the 160-item shortlist, which is based on the World Loanword Database questionnaire, is to measure lexical contact on a micro-level. In other words, to quantify lexical convergence among the speech communities of minority languages on a village-level, and to detect fine-grained areal patterns beyond general observations on the spheres of influence of certain languages.

Contents:

              [,1]
target_words 25796
languages       23

How to cite this project

If you use data from the database in your research, please cite as follows:

Chechuro I., Daniel M., Dobrushina N., and Verhees S. 2019. Daghestanian loans database. Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, HSE. (Available online at https://lingconlab.github.io/Dagloan_database/DL_database.html, DOI, accessed on April 07, 2019.)

The database

For now, the table shows source Concepts and target Words. Each target word is grouped in a similarity Set - a set of words that have the same meaning and look similar. In the future, data will be added on borrowing sources. Metadata includes the name of the Village where the word was recorded, the administrative District it is part of, the Language spoken there, and the List ID: these ID’s correspond to a particular speaker or in some cases a written source like a dictionary. Data is accessible at: Github/LingConLab/DagloanDatabase.
The dataset in the dummy format is available here.

Version: 2019-04-07. For questions or comments contact jh.verhees@gmail.com.

Map of the surveyed villages

Hover over and / or click on a dot on the map to know more. The color of the dots corresponds to the number of lists collected in a village. Orange = dictionary data.

Sample lexical map

The map below shows the distribution of different stems for the concept ‘pepper’.

Sources of lexical influence

Mediation of Turkic loanwords

    Speaker InLezgi Loans Language Village District
8   Bezhta1       0     8   Bezhta  Bezhta   Tsunta
48 Helmets1       0    29  Tsakhur Gelmets    Rutul
49 Helmets2       0    26  Tsakhur Gelmets    Rutul
50 Helmets3       0    25  Tsakhur Gelmets    Rutul
51  Ikhrek1       0    18    Rutul  Ikhrek    Rutul
52  Ikhrek2       0    19    Rutul  Ikhrek    Rutul
53  Ikhrek3       0    20    Rutul  Ikhrek    Rutul
54  Ikhrek4       0    16    Rutul  Ikhrek    Rutul
56  Karata1       0     8   Karata  Karata  Akhvakh
57  Karata2       0     8   Karata  Karata  Akhvakh
58  Karata3       0     7   Karata  Karata  Akhvakh
59  Karata4       0     9   Karata  Karata  Akhvakh
 [ reached 'max' / getOption("max.print") -- omitted 66 rows ]

Ilya Chechuro, Michael Daniel, Samira Verhees

2019-04-07